UK Policy and African Agency: Whose Agency? Whose Interests?
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UK Policy and African Agency: Whose Agency? Whose Interests? Tom Cargill (Chatham House) BISA ISA 2012 The recent history of United Kingdom engagement with regards to Africa offers some useful insights as to the changing nature and extent of African Agency. This chapter examines some of these engagements, particularly as they relate to UK government policy and civil society activism, and question the extent to which they supported or denied African agency. In this context agency is defined simply as the capacity, as a matter of deliberate policy, to exert political influence externally. The UK itself retains considerable agency with regards to Africa, yet the degree to which UK governments have chosen to exercise that agency has, until recently, been minimal. In the past ten years this has appeared to change, largely with the expressed objective of using UK agency largely altruistically with regards to Africa in support of greater African agency. This UK objective is now changing also, on the basis that it has been, at least partially, met and that the rationale upon which it was based - that the UK could afford such an objective and that Africa could and should offer little in return - is no longer the case (if it ever was). Whether this change heralds a return to an old narrative of exploitation, or heralds a new era of greater African agency is a question that flows throughout this book, but will be at least partially addressed from the UK perspective in this chapter. The UK & Africa: Why does it matter? The UK’s continued disproportionate importance for African Agency emanates largely from the decaying and yet still potent afterglow of the UK’s imperial past. This continued importance is perhaps disguised by the scale of loss of influence through the second half of the 20th century. Yet the UK remains influential from a governmental and multilateral institutional point of view - through the UK’s continued permanent membership of the UN Security Council, and activist role it seeks to play across a large number of international issues. At least as important are the significant numbers of influential civil society campaign groups with global mandate based out of the UK, many with a particular focus on Africa. The international news media too has a disproportionate presence in the UK and London in particular, with most English language services producing a significant proportion, if not the majority, of their Africa related content out of the UK. In addition, the influence of UK based academic thought on Africa related issues remains disproportionate, with the UK the second largest source of journals and news sources with a specific Africa focus after the US, though if this is narrowed down to quality sources with a political focus and relatively wide international readership the UK has more than any other country. The relationships UK based academic institutions enjoy across Africa is also significant. The international role of the City of London, and the influence it continues to exert on international legal, business, financial and regulatory practice has considerable impact on Africa.1 Finally, the increasing prominence in the UK of people with immediate African background and/or strong family connections in Africa is, longer term, perhaps most important of all. Members of these communities, ever more deeply rooted and influential in British cultural, political and economic life, are also increasingly important and assertive actors in bilateral relations - including in funding political objectives, developmental programmes and commercial 1 For instance the Government of China has for some time been considering using UK law as the basis for all Chinese commercial engagements in Africa 1 operations in various African countries - both individually and specifically as UK based groups. This has added to the importance of a growing number of British cities as fundraising destinations for ambitious politicians from across Africa. All of these sources - governmental, civil society, media, academic and the City, are supported by, and in turn support, the widespread employment of UK citizens in positions of influence throughout international and internationally focussed, organisations which tend, whether they are financial, campaigning, political journalistic or other, to collectively, have a higher degree of influential interaction with and on states in Africa than elsewhere. The impact this has, and the extent to which it is in support of, ‘UK’ influence per se is hard to quantify but is profound.2 In all of these ways the UK still has a considerable degree of agency with regards to Africa. Yet for a period from the 1970s until the beginning of the 21st Century, when many aspects of this agency were far stronger than they are today, this agency was not exercised to any significant degree on the part of the UK government. The reasons for this are varied, but cluster around a historically rooted moralism in UK engagement in Africa. Julia Gallagher writes persuasively of ‘doing good in Africa’ as being a particular feature of the post 1997 Labour Government under Tony Blair3. This tendency has its roots in the late 18th and 19th century anti-slavery and missionary movements initiated by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, feeding into the campaigns of ED Morel and Roger Casement against Belgian Royal exploitation in the Congo.4 Reflecting the growth of the Fabian Society and Labour movement this tendency split in the early 20th century into a liberal paternalistic and basically Imperialist moral movement, as personified in the Christian Missionary Society and the World Council of Churches under Joseph Oldham and the campaigning of Lionel Curtis, and an anti-colonial internationalist movement embracing the Communist Party, and parts of the Labour Party, British left wing intelligensia and trade union movement personified in such figures as Leonard Woolf and Fenner Brockway5. Both wings continued to evolve as the Second World War, Cold War and then decolonisation changed the context in which they operated. Yet they did not fade, and in fact as official UK and business engagement and imperialist ambitions with regards to Africa retreated through the 1970s, these campaigns came to dominate Africa in much of the UK public and elite imagination, eventually metamorphosising via the anti-Apartheid campaigns into Live Aid, the Jubilee Campaign and the related constellation of Africa focussed rights, aid, and 2 The insistence by the US and Europe on reserving leadership of the World Bank and IMF respectively for their own citizens is testament to this. 3 For a fascinating description of the roles which ideas of Africa played in Labour Party and, to some extent broader elite thinking in the UK from the 19th century to the present see Julia Gallagher, ‘Britain and Africa Under Blair: In pursuit of the good state’ ( Manchester University Press, 2011) 4 A key attribute of all of these moral campaigns is that while Africa was, technically, rarely their sole geographical focus, the exoticisation of Africa as the ‘other’, the ‘dark continent’ and of Africans as noble savages came to dominate the British public imagination to such an extent that any campaign organised around a certain set of aims - internationalist, developmental, justice, rights focussed - unless it were expressly stated otherwise, was assumed to have Africa as its primary focus. This tendency only increased as large parts of Asia and South America grew economically and became assertive politically in the 1970s and 1980s leaving Africa ever more adrift from the international political and economic mainstream. 5 Tim Shaw & Lucian Ashworth, ‘Commonwealth Perspectives on International Relations’ International Affairs, 86, 5 (2010) pp 1149-1165 http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/International%20Affairs/2010/86_5shaw_ashworth. pdf 2 development advocacy campaigns.6 The sentiment behind them also came to infuse much academic consideration on Africa, as part of the growth of development studies and its popularity amongst students interested in Africa. By the 1980s, for large parts of the British left, the campaigning space on Africa was one of the few remaining arenas in which they could argue their case in a relatively popular and uncontested manner free from the complications and reversals brought about by Thatcherism and Labour’s intellectual miasma. The 1997 Labour Government By the mid-1990s, the importance of more active altruistic state support for international development, divorced from self interested foreign policy objectives, was one of the few remaining near consensus issues for the Labour left, and all the more important for that as the party leadership made the transition to New Labour. When New Labour won the 1997 election there were rearguard attempts to retain some FCO influence over development policy, and Clare Short was initially reluctant when asked to take on the new Department for International Development7. However her demand that it retain complete independence as a Cabinet level department of state ensured that the establishment of DFID was a landmark act of the new government - perhaps the last significant extension of UK welfarism in the spirit of the 1945-’51 Labour government. By the time of Labour’s 1997 election victory, UK government involvement in Africa was so limited that there was little reaction from African leaders. Inevitably there was uncertainty over the implications of the establishment of DfID as a new department separate from the FCO, but much of the continent was too consumed with other challenges to pay much attention. Indeed, for the first year or so the lack of interest seemed justified, as UK policy in Africa remained broadly the same as it had been under the previous Conservative administration: that is; lukewarm support for UK trade and Business interests that requested it and minimal political interventions. On conflict in Sierra Leone and dictatorship in Nigeria the UK fell in with the general Commonwealth consensus; on the Eritrea Ethiopia border conflict the UK toed the UN line.